Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [41]
“If you had let him out he would have just got run over,” says Cleo. She strokes Dexter and he stirs slightly. His fur is dull and thin.
“I’ll just have to accept it,” says Rita Jean.
“Maybe it will be good for you,” says Cleo, more harshly than she intends. “I’ve about decided there’s no use trying to hang on to anything. You just lose it all in the end. You might as well just not care.”
“Don’t talk that way, Cleo.”
“I must be getting old.” Cleo laughs. “I’m saying what I think more. Or younger, one. Old people and children—they always say what they think.”
Over coffee, Cleo talks Rita Jean into going to trade day at the stockyard.
“Linda said we’ve got to get out, keep up with the times,” Cleo says. “Just what I need—more junk. But it’s the style.”
“Maybe it will take our minds off of everything,” says Rita Jean, getting her scarf.
Most of the traders at the stockyard are farmers who trade in secondhand goods on the side. Cleo is shocked to realize this, though she knows nobody can make a living on a farm these days. She recognizes some of the farmers, behind their folding tables of dusty old objects. Even at the time of Jake’s death, feeding the cows was costing almost as much as the milk brought. She cannot imagine Jake in a camper, peddling some old junk from the barn. That would kill him if the heart attack hadn’t.
Cleo and Rita Jean drift from table to table, touching Depression glass, crystal goblets, cracked china, cast-off egg beaters and mixers, rusted farm implements, and greasy wooden boxes stuffed with buttons and papers.
“I never saw so much old stuff,” says Cleo.
“Look at this,” says Rita Jean, pointing to a box of plastic jump ropes. “These aren’t old.”
They look at hand-tooled leather belts and billfolds, made by prisoners. And paintings of bright scenes on black velvet—bullfights and skylines and sunsets. A man in a cowboy hat displays the paintings from a fancy camper called a Sports Coach.
“He must have come from far away,” says Rita Jean.
“I used to have a set of these.” Cleo holds a tiny crystal salt shaker, without the pepper. There is a syrup holder to match.
“You could spend all day here,” says Rita Jean, looking around like a lost child.
Cleo doesn’t hear her. All of a sudden her blood is rushing to her head and her stomach is churning. She is looking at a miniature Early American whatnot, right in front of her. It is imitation mahogany. She holds it, touching it, turning it, amazed.
“If it had been a snake it would have bit me!” cries Cleo, astonished. But Rita Jean is intent on examining a set of enamel canisters with cat decals on them and doesn’t notice.
The whatnot cannot be the same one. Cleo cannot remember what happened to the little whatnot that sat on the dresser, the box in which Jake kept his stamps, his receipts, and his bankbook.
This whatnot has a door held in place by a wooden button, and on the top, like books on a shelf, is a series of tiny boxes, with sliding covers like match boxes. The little boxes have names: Book Plates, Mending Tape, Gummed Patches, Rubber Bands, Gummed Labels, Mailing Labels. There are pictures on the spines of the boxes, together forming a scene—an old-fashioned train running through a meadow past a river, with black smoke trailing across three of the boxes and meeting a distant mountain. A steamboat is in the background. The curved track extends from the first box to the last. The scene is faded green and yellow, and there are lacy ferns and a tree in the foreground. The boxes are a simple picture puzzle to put in order. Cleo’s children played with the puzzle when they were small, but her grandchildren were never interested in it. It cannot be the very same whatnot, she thinks.
“I’m going to buy this!” Cleo says.
“That’s high,” says Rita Jean, fingering